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Posted by
Per Hansson
on December 12, 2001
Company: EPoX
Europe / US
Product: 8KHA+
KT266A motherboard
Check
8KHA+prices
OR motherboard
prices list.
You can also select to
have the voltage and frequencies displayed when the
computers POSTs, and also let the BIOS shut down the
computer when it reaches a certain temperature... Though it
only uses the onboard sensor chip, and not the one built
into the AMD Athlon XP CPU's. And thus it probably will not
be able to shut down the processor in time if the heatsink
has fallen off when you start the computer...
It neither means nothing
that as soon as the onboard port 80 device shows
"FF" i.e. that the operating system has overtaken
control of the computer the BIOS can't shut the computer
down even if it crosses it's set max processor temperature
value...
Another neat feature is
that you can press the ESC key when the computer starts and
select which device you want to boot with, floppy, cd-rom,
or any of your installed Hard drives; your choice…
This can also cut down
on booting-times because you can select to only start from
your Harddrive and not first search through the cd-rom and
floppy, though you can of course do this with other
computers lacking this menu but it becomes a real hassle
when you do want to start with other device than your Hard
drive…
On a sidenote I might
add that I ran into a small problem related to stability, on
my previous Abit KT7A mainboard I was able to run my AMD
Athlon XP 1,33Ghz CPU at 1,6Ghz without any stability
problems at all, but on this mainboard the computer would
occasionally lock up. (After about 10 hours of really heavy
use.)
The root of the problem
is actually quite ridiculous, this mainboard allows you to
connect a led to a connector on the board to see when the
“turbo” mode is on, and the led showed that this mode in
fact was enabled, you don’t have any option to change this
setting, just see that it is on. In older mainboards you had
a button to press to overclock the FSB a percent or so,
increasing your processor speed by a few Mhz. So when you
select an FSB of 133Mhz it is infact set to 133,64Mhz by the
ICS 94228 BF clock generator, effectively overclocking my
processor about 4Mhz, which was beyond the limit my CPU
would allow me to go…
Decreasing the
multiplier to 11,5x and thus the processor speed to 1533Mhz
cured all my stability problems, I haven’t been able to
crash it again after that. I haven’t been able to confirm
the rumours saying that this board is unstable... I copied a
500MB file indefinitely, ran the Distributed.net client
which uses all processor power and also ran 3Dmark 2001 in
looping mode, and after I decreased the multiplier by 0,5x
the computer managed to run this test 24 hours straight,
then I shutted it down… No crashes that far… If I run
into any stability problems I will update this article, but
it seems unlikely considering that the BIOS is set to the
absolute maximum performance settings possible bar one
setting, “DRAM Active to CMD” for the RAM, changing this
setting to 2 makes my computer crash before Windows is able
to load and as such I’m keeping it at 3… This is
probably due to the memory I’m using. Take a look at the
screenshot on the previous page to see what RAM timings
I’m using…
Here you see the onboard
port 80 device, when the computer starts it displays what
the computer is currently doing with a number code, and in
the event that the computers hangs/fails/stops you will see
exactly what it was doing and as such it will be extremely
much more easy to find the cause of the error as opposed to
a mainboard without this very nice feature.
Worth mentioning is also
the BIOS chip which as you can see is the “modern”
model, and not the old rectangular one which was very big
and often put under the PCI cards forcing you to remove them
if you wanted to replace the chip.
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